Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

When Warnings Don’t Work

TORNADO ALLEY A twister sweeps across the southern plains of the central United States, where thunderstorms can produce violent whirlwinds.Credit
Carsten Peter/National Geographic -- Getty Images

TORNADO experts had seen it all before: whole neighborhoods obliterated, big-box stores flattened, even a hospital badly damaged.

But what really shocked them about the powerful storm that struck Joplin, Mo., last week was the toll in lives: more than 125 and counting. “We thought we were done with the 100-dead tornadoes,” said Thomas P. Grazulis, a tornado historian in St. Johnsbury, Vt. “With warnings and Doppler radar, there was a lot of feeling that we were done with this stuff.”

Experts are not sure yet why the toll was so high. Forecasts were made and warnings were issued, and this was an area, in the heart of Tornado Alley, where people knew what to do to protect themselves. “But something didn’t work the way we’d like it to,” said Harold Brooks , a research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla.

Experts say there will always be deaths when a strong tornado scores a direct hit on a heavily populated area. The question — for all disasters, not just twisters — has been how low casualty figures can go.

“The fundamental characteristic of a major disaster is that there is going to be loss,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “The goal of preparedness is to make that loss as minimal as possible, to optimize survival.”

During the 20th century, strides were made in optimizing survival from tornadoes. In the early part of the century, yearly deaths from twisters in the United States averaged a little less than 2 per million population, or about 200 per year in the 1920s. Beginning that decade, as awareness of the dangers increased and forecasting technologies were developed and improved, the death rate declined by an order of magnitude, reaching about 0.2 per million in the mid-1990s, or about 60 people per year.

Photo

AFTERMATH A rescue worker and his dog search for victims in the wreckage of a nursing home in Joplin, Mo.Credit
Roger Nomer/The Joplin Globe, via Associated Press

Since then, Mr. Brooks said, it has leveled off, and while no one is certain why, researchers think the rise in mobile-home living is one reason. Lightly built and poorly anchored, mobile homes can be death traps in the extreme winds of a tornado.

Mr. Brooks said the timing of the storm last week — 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday — may have had something to do with the 100-plus deaths. He compared the Joplin event to a tornado that struck Oklahoma City in 1999 and killed about one-fourth as many people. That twister hit after 7 p.m. on a Monday, when most people had settled in for the evening. “That’s not a bad time to get information to people,” Mr. Brooks said. But in Joplin, he added, “late Sunday afternoon, maybe there’s some issues with communication going on.”

Complicating the situation in Joplin was the fact that a high school graduation had occurred that afternoon, and more people were out and about, at parties or other events. And many people ended up in large stores, which tornado warnings say should be avoided because of the strong risk of collapse.

“Did people not receive the message?” Mr. Brooks said. “Did they not internalize the message in some way? Or did they make bad choices?”

While the tornado forecasting system works well, Mr. Brooks said, “we have to work on finding ways of communicating the messages better.”

Photo

“Perhaps we don’t do that in ways that people understand the threat,” he added.

And there is the possibility of issuing so many alerts that people become inured to the danger. Jasper County, where Joplin is located, receives many tornado warnings every year. “We’ve had no evidence in the past that people were overwarned,” Mr. Brooks said, “but we don’t know what the threshold of that is.” Beyond any improvements in forecasting and communication, getting even closer to zero deaths would require additional steps, said Stephen Flynn, president of the Center for National Policy, a Washington research group that studies preparedness issues. The destruction and deaths at the Joplin hospital, he said, pointed to one: replacing conventional windows with safety glass.

“Are you going to do that for a raised-ranch house?” he said. “No. But for a hospital facility where people are vulnerable, yes. And is that a huge cost issue? No, it’s not.”

But other efforts, like building community shelters for people in mobile-home parks or in areas with slab housing that lacks basements, can be costly. And the issue of cost, always major, has grown larger as economic conditions have worsened and governments have had to tighten their belts, Dr. Redlener said. “Dollars are limited,” he added. “States have to make decisions — are we going to provide health insurance for more children, or are we going to do better preparation for a disaster that may never happen?”

Beyond cost, though, are other considerations. In the case of community shelters, Mr. Brooks said, “you need to make sure that the shelter is open when people need it, but make sure it’s not open all the time, where your neighborhood pervert can do something in it.” Potential liability issues have forced many communities to abandon the idea of group shelters, he said.

Individuals can always build shelters for themselves, and one of the truths about natural disasters is that afterward, many people rush to make safety precautions they had ignored before.

Mr. Grazulis, the historian, said that no doubt some people in Joplin would rebuild their homes and include storm shelters, which can cost about $5,000 or more. “But I bet Joplin will not be hit again for a hundred or a thousand years,” he said. “The people that build these shelters — generations are not going to have to use them.”

Instead, the next disaster will happen elsewhere. And right now, Mr. Grazulis said, “the next town that needs them has no idea it needs them.”